Evraz Group is now looking into the reasons for a recent emergency at West Siberian Iron & Steel Plant that left three people injured. A small explosion with a splash of hot iron occurred at the plant’s oxygen converter shop 1 at 10:24 AM on February 8, 2010. Three workers were injured as a result. The rescue teams and the company’s management arrived at the scene at once and took all the measures necessary to cope with the problem. ‘According to our preliminary data, all the operations involving the converter in question (that is, the warm-up, the charge of the furnace with scrap metal,

Ural Airlines announced recently that the company’s fuel fees for international flights would be reduced by 50%. The discount covers the summer destinations most popular with Yekaterinburg dwellers. Thus the fuel fee for Yekaterinburg-Varna and Yekaterinburg-Burgas flights will only come to ?40 and that for Iraklion and Saloniki will come to ?45. The fees for flights to Pula, Tivat, and Tel Aviv will amount to ?45, ?45, and ?60, respectively. The tickets are available at the company’s booking offices between February 15, 2010 and March 15, 2010. The airline started selling tickets for the

Toyota’s Russian representation reported recently that the concern was going to call about 160,000 automobiles off the Russian market because of the possible accelerator pedal defects. The cars in question are the IQ, Yaris, Auris, Corolla, Verso, Avensis, and RAV4 makes produced in 2005-2010. The car owners will soon be requested to take their vehicles to the dealers’ offices for examination and possibly for repairs. ‘I am truly sorry about this worrying situation. Toyota has always placed its customers first, whatever the circumstances,’ says head of Toyota’s Russian representation Takeshi

The Bank of Russia came up with a list of the Russian Federation constituencies and municipalities whose rating comes to at least B-/B3. According to the bank’s official website, the list comprises thirty-eight Russian regions, including Sverdlovsk Region.

Rus, the nongovernmental retirement fund, won the court case against OAO AlfaStrakhovaniye, the insurance company. The plaintiff wanted to be paid the insurance money resulting from the company’s financial risk insurance agreement, the spokesperson for the retirement fund reports. Rus signed this financial risk insurance agreement with AlfaStrakhovaniye on April 1, 2008. An insurance event occurred, but the insurer failed to meet its contractual obligations, so Rus took the case to Moscow Arbitration Court, demanding that the indemnity be paid. Having looked into the case, the court ruled

Magnitogorsk Iron & Steel Works (MMK) supplied more metal goods to the Middle East in the year 2009 compared to the year 2008, MMK PR Department reports. Last year, MMK delivered 1,661 tons of goods to this key export region, which was 5% more than in 2008. Also, 35% of the company’s foreign market sales was exported to Asia and the Far East, 11% was supplied to Europe, and 6% was delivered to African countries. 1% and 3.6% of MMK’s exported goods went to North America and Central/South America, respectively. All in all, MMK exported 3,861 tons of goods last year. At the same time, the

The twelve departments of A.M. Gorkiy Ural State University are going to merge into four institutes by the summer of 2010. The public hearings on the new institutes’ design and policies will take place at USU on February 16-18, 2010; everyone is welcome to take part in the discussion. The decision regarding the merger and the hearing was taken by the university’s academic council. Ural State University is to be divided into the institutes of Mathematics & Computer Science, Natural Sciences, Political Sciences & Sociology, and Humanities. In addition to this, the departments now

President of Russian Railways Public Company Vladimir Yakunin held a telephone conference with his administration on the company’s performance in January 2010. Yakunin said the railways’ passenger turnover dropped by over 11% in January 2010 compared with the previous January. In order to make sure there are enough commuter trains in the Russian regions, Russian Railways intends to cooperate more effectively with the regional authorities. According to the company’s President, the regional budgets provided the business with 2.8 billion RUR last year in compensation for the losses the railways

OAO CIT Finance Investment Bank announced it was going to close down the company’s representations in thirty Russian cities including the ones in Nizhniy Tagil, Perm, and Nizhnevartovsk. The bank says this will be done due to the need to make their regional subsidiary network more cost-efficient.

Novolipetsk Iron & Steel Works (NLMK) section iron division’s enterprises, which were united under OOO NLMK-Sort’s management in December 2009, produced 1.7 million tons of steel in 2009. This was 11% less than in 2008. Also, the enterprises sold 1 million tons of reinforcing bar to their customers, which was 5.7% less than in the year 2008. On the other hand, the sales of wire rod were up 1.2% last year compared to the year before and amounted to 68,000 tons. The sales of metal products also increased by 29% in 2009 compared to 2008, reaching 188,000 tons. However, the amount of steel

Microsoft once again came up with the findings of its piracy monitoring research involving retail computer stores in Russian provinces. According to these findings, about a quarter of the 2,500 outlets inspected (all of which are located in fifty-three different cities of Russia) offer unlicensed software for sale in one way or another. 11% of the stores inspected offer their customers pre-installed pirated software. Microsoft reports that, despite the general decrease in the supply of counterfeits (from 63% of the total market volume in September 2009 down to 30% in November and December

‘This year has already seen a certain revival of the local automobile market. We haven’t got any shortage thanks to the company’s shipping volumes and working policies. However, it’s true of Yekaterinburg’s car market as a whole that there might be not enough expensive cars for customers to buy,’ OOO Mercedez Benz official dealer Delta Center’s Sales Manager Andrei Yurtanov said to UrBC. ‘The demand did go down a bit, even though we have regular customers and special policies. Our statistical data is based on incidental sales rather than a big customer flow, but, all in all, our sales volumes

‘We haven’t got any information regarding Alexei Kalinichenko’s extradition from Morocco yet. But we have been keeping a very close eye on the development of affairs,’ the spokesperson for Ural Federal District’s Department of Internal Affairs Main Administration told UrBC. Alexei Kalinichenko is suspected of setting up a pyramid scheme in Russia through a company called Global Gaming Expo. He is accused of stealing over 1 billion RUR from 4,000 Russian citizens. The businessman was earlier detained in Italy, so the Russian authorities insisted on is extradition. The Italian court ruled in

Governor of Sverdlovsk Region Alexander Misharin met Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Republic of Latvia to the Russian Federation Edgars Skuja. The two officials discussed the ways in which the two territories could cooperate. For one, they saw some good opportunities for machine-building development through joint small and medium ventures. Governor Misharin asked the region’s Minister for Trade, Food, and Services Dmitriy Nozhenko to find the way of working with the Latvian suppliers directly, without any intermediaries. He also said that UMMC Holding was a great

A customer of Bank24.ru was faced with a number of problems when trying to open and then to close a deposit through the bank’s e-system. The incident was described on one of Yekaterinburg’s popular forums. To start with, the bank took a very long time considering the customer’s application. In fact, it took the bank a week instead of the declared two days. Closing the deposit when its term expired was also a problem. The customer reports the bank was to have closed the deposit and to have paid the interest on February 2, 2010. However, this never happened. On February 3, 2010, the customer

The Russian Federation Ministry for Industry and Trade came up with the list of car makes that are liable to recycling under the new stimulus program. The program is expected to boost the sales of new cars through recycling the old ones. Every Russian citizen who recycles an automobile which is over ten years old is given a 50,000-ruble discount by a dealer in case he or she buys a car produced in Russia (and this has to be one of the cars on the list in question). The Russian Federation Government allocated over 11 billion RUR for the program implementation. The program is to be launched on

FINAM Investment Company decreased its target price assessment of OAO FSK EES’s ordinary shares from $.0.0193 down to $0.0135. This is the company’s forecast for the end of 2010. Nevertheless, FINAM still recommends buying the electricity provider’s shares. FINAM actually decided to reconsider the target price after the Federal Tariff Service confirmed the parameters which FSK EES is to use when switching to RAB-based tariff design, and also because the company’s management came up with some new financial forecasts.

Kirovskiy supermarket chain recently closed down two stores at 16 Lenin Ave. and at 62 Lenin Ave. in Yekaterinburg, the chain’s press officer Olga Nagibina said to an UrBC reporter. ‘As it happens, we own about 98% of all our shopping space, but a little bit is rented. The building at 16 Lenin Ave. belonged to two different proprietors, one of whom decided to sell his bit. So we did not think it would be expedient to renew our lease,’ she explained. ‘As for the store at 62 Lenin Ave, some technical examinations made it clear as early as December 2009 that the rented building was not in good

‘We can currently offer our customers only a limited number of last year’s models because the distributor does not supply us with the amount the market needs. The production of cars was reduced at the end of 2009, as it was feared the unstable economic situation could affect the customers’ purchasing power badly, so the car manufacturer might suffer from overstocking. As a result, these wrong forecasts have led to shortage, with the demand outgrowing the supply,’ says Head of Toyota Center Yekaterinburg Zapad’s Sales Department Sergey Nosov. ‘Ironically, some of the most popular cars at the

‘We have been witnessing some revival of Yekaterinburg car market lately. For one, customers are once again interested in expensive makes. Subaru has just come up with a new and quite high-priced model that is already so popular that we have a shortage. Our customers find themselves having to wait for two or three months before these popular makes arrive,’ Head of OOO Subaru Center Yekaterinburg Yug’s Sales Department Sergey Mankevitch told UrBC. OOO Subaru Center Yekaterinburg Yug is Subaru’s official dealer in Yekaterinburg. ‘Making plans and coming up with forecasts for this year’s